Do you know Noma, the world famous restaurant? Are you aware of their new human/nature based plans? What about Byhøst or the Maritime Community Gardens? What is your 10-year rewilding program? And your company’s biodiversity score? Does your domicile invite all species as if life mattered?

In the coming decades, no other field will generate as many start-ups, technologies, and cultural changes, as the human/nature interface. So far, it’s a market mostly inhabited by small agents, as they are most agile in their transition to the human/nature agenda. But they are just the tip of the iceberg of a deep revolution.

At Growing Pathways, we dedicate ourselves to understanding this wave and sharing its insights and methods. With our help, you can rethink your work, brand, products, from the human/nature point of view.

Now, we invite you to learn with the incredible wave of nature-related changemakers and entrepreneurs. Feel the force and attraction contained in a focus that breathes life. Unpack, invite, create: that’s human/nature relations.

We have designed four levels to let you think about where you might want to step in. The levels are all customizable.

Level 1: Inspirational talk

Do you know the biodiversity index of your territory? How many nature-oriented entrepreneurs do you host in your organizational network? What is a human/nature relation? How does it work and what are the benefits for you?

Let us take you for a ride of the last 10 000 years of human/nature relations – and the next ten. The discourse, the language, the institutions, the places and things. Learn what we try to do to nature and how it responds. How a human/nature bridge works. After two hours of common discovery, your world will never be the same.

Level 2: Human/Nature organizational workshop

The communicative success of branding products, organizations, and value chains brought along an unintended backlash: it left its proponents deaf and blind to their relation to nature.

Managers and specialists walk the human/nature edge every day, looking ‘out’ at nature from ‘within’ their human perspective. Most of us lack the language to understand, relate, and measure the contents of their relations to nature. Nature is perceived either a space that we pass through or the body from which we extract materials to make what feeds us.

But in fact, every act of communication, organization or production, expresses a relation to nature, whether manifest or not. Do you think of the world as a mechanical thing, bodies as clockworks, and organizations as machines? Then it’s time to embrace the complex multiplicity of adaptive natural systems and reformulate your value circles.

Our human/nature relations workshop will take place outside of your known territory. It could be on an island outside the Norwegian coast, with goats and rocks around. It could be in the wild woods of Lapland. It could also be just next to a city center. Any place we go, you will have your understanding of that human/nature bridge shaken and stirred and repositioned. Everything is very hands on; the only transformative learning possible comes from action.

Level 3: Lab

Sustainability has become accepted as a set of conditions that organizations have to meet. The crucial mistake is to externalize what is not directly accessible as carbon dioxide outlets or KWhs and forget that everything we exclude from the human/nature equation comes back at us eventually.

Working across disciplines is the condition of the future. Learning to embrace nature relations is a way to bridge the rift between inside and outside of the organization or the municipality.

At the lab level, we will identify a particular place in your territorial environment, map the possible stakeholders, human and non-human, and facilitate creative interactions from there. We draw from the kit of approaches of Cultural Mapping, but with a specific focus on how to turn the human/nature relation into a common resource.

The outcome is a redefined set of relations, indicating possible partnerships and common pathways to follow. We leave you with a catalog of ideas and connected to a growing, international network.

Level 4: Transformation

The greatest challenge of working for a liveable planet for all lies in the gaps between disciplines and between actors. Nature is perceived in as many ways as there are people working with it – not to mention the ones that think nature is something left in the jungle or the desert.

At the transformative level, we can include all the smaller steps, repeat them, and widen the circle of engagement. To that, we add the development of platforms of common engagement, starting from all the places on your territorial map that are calling for action.

A transformational process might take some years to carry out. It’s human/nature, after all, possibly even more complex than software development. Together with the partners of a project, we will map and fixate the practical forms that are the most relevant to that corner of the world that you inhabit. We will bring in the necessary expertise and motivated agents.

You may even want to explore with us how we could set new standards for the human/nature relation by creating the world-wide index of human/nature urban relations. We are looking for partners and investors – maybe you are just the one we need?

Or, in a more modest tone, read on below, where we take you into a project that speaks more specifically about redefining human/nature relations, for citizens, municipalities, and practical agents, in Copenhagen.